#Manship4002 Strategic Social Media - Twitter Best Practices - Lecture 4

1. #MC4002

2.  Decide your purpose. Are you building a company brand?
Generating leads? Sharing ideas? Gathering news? Building
relationships / networking?
 Focus. Don’t be a jack of all Twitter subjects.
 Define your brand. Do you want to specialize in one subject, or
be more general? Are you going for casual or professional?
Thought leader or celebrity?
 Determine your strategy. Influence, promote, sell, listen?
 Take a good picture. A close-up headshot of yourself or a logo of
your business. Make sure the image is clear and well-lit, with your
face recognizable and in the center. (Please no gifs or eggs!)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2013/08/30/31-twitter-tips-how-touse-twitter-tools-and-twitter-best-practices-for-business/3/

3.  Tap into existing traffic. It’s good to get creative, but also
identify keywords (using Google Keyword Planner) and hashtags
that are relevant, or make up your industry or market.
 #hashtags are tags that act as hyperlinks to all recent tweets including
that hashtag. Use hashtags intelligently – don’t over-# your tweets.
 Create a great bio. Wordsmith your profile with keywords for
search and fun facts for people.
 Organize with Twitter lists.
 Listen before you Tweet. Engage in conversations, Re-Tweet
and Reply.

4.  Publish your Twitter ID in your other media (e-mail signatures,
blogs, etc.)
 Follow Rule: I follow you then (hopefully) you follow me. You
have to reciprocate (through ―favorites,‖ Re-Tweets and Follows)
in order to grow your own account.

5.  Create and tweet great original content that fits your purpose. Create
content that is informative and entertaining. Be original and useful. Don’t just
regurgitate. Write about your passions. Share your own expertise.
 Summarize and curate great content. Share facts, insights and statistics.
Contextualize Re-tweets with your own expertise.
 Pair Tweeting with Blogging, etc. Tweets that share links get Re-tweeted
more often than those that don’t. Use Twitter to share website updates, blog
posts, videos, pictures, other multimedia.
 Keep in short. Try to keep your tweets to ~100 characters so others can re-
tweet them with a mention and comment(s).
 Keep tweeting – Resend tweets with different angles and for different time
zones.
 Retweet great content: It helps you make friends with other influencers on
Twitter, and it shows your follows you’re an active member of your online
community.

7. @jessicahische
 by putting another person’s username at the start of a statement, it
limits who sees it (@username)
 But there are times when you want to share a reply with your followers
(e.g. if your reply contains something useful for your followers)…
 IF you don’t want to limit who sees it, add a period in front of the reply
(.@username)
 as long as your username is somewhere in their post, it will be in
your @mentions feed
 ―reply‖ feature recently which allows you to see a conversation string.
There is a difference between ―replying to‖ a tweet and simply
beginning a tweet with a person’s username. The former will keep
the conversation intact, and the latter will not.

8.  A way to privately chat on Twitter
 BOTH USERS must follow each other to Direct Message. You
can’t DM someone who doesn’t follow you.

9.  More than half of all journalists turn to sites like Twitter for story
research (Mashable, Guardian). (However, with 84% most
journalists use information delivered via social media rather
cautious as they think it is less reliable than information delivered
via traditional media.)
 Use Twitter to update people during a crisis: during a 2011
blizzard, Chicago Red Cross monitored relevant hashtags, used
Twitter to disseminate weather and safety updates, and even
connected volunteers with stranded motorists.
 Find a job! (Help a PR Pro Out #HAPPO)
 Crowdsource research and solve problems (by asking your
Twitter followers questions)

10.  Participate in one of these Twitter Chats this week!
 #measurePR -– moderated by Shonali Burke, every other
Tuesday from noon-1 p.m. EST. Discussions center on effective
ways to measure the value of public relations and social media.
 #pr20chat — moderated by Heather Whaling (the author of this
post) and Justin Goldsborough, Tuesdays, 8-9 p.m. EST.
Discussion focuses on PR 2.0 –- PR and social media trends,
best practices and what’s next.

11.  Create Tweets that resonate. Combine exciting, useful content
with an engaging, unique tone to emotionally connect with your
audience. Include links, pictures and videos.
 Keep in short & sweet: your have 140 characters, but tweets with
~100 characters are easier for others to share with their own
comments.
 Tweet often (3 – 5 Tweets per day).
 Keep in conversational (tweet like a friendly conversation).
 Follow your interests (follow accounts interesting to you or your
business).
 Participate in Twitter trends, trending hashtags & chats.
 Funny, helpful, newsworthy or inspiring content gets SHARED.

13.  Tweet exceptional content.
 ―the most retweeted content tends to contain links, pictures, videos or
quotes.‖ - Twitter Write Good Tweets
 Tweets with photos get twice the response.
 DO include links. One of the beauties of Twitter is while you only have
140 characters, you can link directly to the source.
 Paste a link of any length into the Tweet box and it will automatically
be shortened to fit the 140 character limit.
 Engage
 Ask questions. Listen. Show people you are listening by responding.
 Stop talking (all) about yourself.

14.  Twitter is particularly powerful at driving ―amplification‖ for brand
messages.
 Tweets drive traffic to the web – so include links
 Make sure urls in your tweets have a space before them – or they
won’t be ―clickable‖

15.  In groups of 4, find a brand/organization on Twitter that is famous
or interesting to you.
 Evaluate their last 10 Tweets according to what we have
discussed in this class.
 Share! (Tweet/Blog)

16.  But do audience research to see when best times are for YOUR specific
audience. Best to Tweet during “busy hours” 8am-7pm
 Twitter engagement rates for brands are 17% higher on Saturday and
Sunday compared to weekdays, but brands don’t take advantage of this
trend.

17. http://twittercounter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Strategies-for-effective-tweeting.pdf

18. http://twittercounter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Strategies-for-effective-tweeting.pdf

19. http://twittercounter.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Strategies-for-effective-tweeting.pdf

20.  Most users access Twitter daily or multiple times per day.

21.  DON’T Impersonate others, or in a way to mislead, confuse, deceive
 Respect trademarks
 DON’T publish private information (other’s private or confidential
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information)
DON’T publish threats of violence, or harass others
Respect copyright (include photos, etc.)
DON’T user Twitter for unlawful use
DON’T user promoted or verified Twitter badges unless provided by
Twitter
Accounts inactive for > 6 months may be removed
DON’T spam!
 *also, sometimes Twitter thinks new users are spammers if they tweet lots of
links instead of personal posts, follow lots of people all at one time, or post
multiple unrelated updates to a trending hashtag, etc. So be careful.
 DON’T pornography